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What should be done with old news articles?

We have a portal website that gives information about the industry we work in. This website includes various articles, tips, info, reviews and more about the industry.
We also have a news section that was previously indexed in Google news but is not for the past few month.
The site was hit by Panda over a year ago and one of the things we have been thinking of doing is removing pages that are irrelavant/do not provide added value to the site.
Some of these pages are old news articles posted over 3-4 years ago and that have had hardly any traffic to.
All the news articles on the site are under a /archive/ folder sorted by month and year, so for example a url for a news item from April 2010 would be /archive/042010/article-name
My question is do you think removing such news articles would benefit the site helping it get out of Panda (many other things have been done in the site as well), if not what is the best suggested way to keep these articles on the site in a way which Google indexes them and treats them well.
thx

3 Responses

Basically I don't see a reason to remove old news articles from a site, as it makes sense to still have an archive present. The only reason I could think of to remove them is if they are duplicate versions of texts that have originally been published somewhere else. Or if the quality is really crap...

if the articles are good - then there just might be value to the user . Depending on the niche / industry those old articles could be very important.

Google dosen't like those as you probably have a lot of impression but no clicks (so mainly no traffic) or maybe the "score" is bad (bounce rate - not Google analytics bounce rate, but Google's bounce rate - if they bounce to serps that is).

Since you got hit by panda, in my opinion, I see two options:

1. No index those old pages. The users can still get tho those by navigation, site search etc but google won't see them. Google is fine with having content (old, poor, thin etc) if it's not in the index. I work with a site that has several million pages and 80% is no index - everything is fine now (they also got hit by Panda).

2. Merge those pages into rich, cool, fresh topic pages (see new york time topic pages sample - search for it - I think there is also an seomoz post - a whiteboard friday about it). This is a good approach and if you manage to merge those old pages with some new content you will be fine. Topic pages are great as an anti panda tool !

If you merge the pages into topic pages do that based on a simple flow:

1. identify a group of pages that covers the same topic.

2. identify the page that has the highest authority of all.

3. Change this page into the topic page - keep the url.

4. Merge the other into this page (based on your new topic page structure and flow)

5. 301 redirect the others to this one

6. build a separat xml sitemaps with all those pages and load it up to WMT. Monitor it.

7. Build some links to some of those landing pages, get some minimum social signals to those - to a few (depending on the number). Build an index typoe of page with those topic pages or some of them (user friendly one/ ones) and use those as target to build some links to send the 'love'.

I do think that any site should remove pages that are not valuable to users.

I would look for the articles that have external links pointed at them and 301 those to something relevant. The rest, you could simply remove and let them return a 404 status. Just make sure all internal links pointing at them are gone. You don't want to lead people to a 404 page.

You could consider putting /archive/ in your robots.txt file if you think the pages have some value to users, but not to the engines. Or putting a no index tag on each page in that section.

If you want to keep the articles on the site, available to both google and users, you have to make sure they meet some of this basic criteria.

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